DECIPHER.com > The Lord of the Rings > Expansions > Battle of Helm's Deep

Presidents and Circuses

by Joe Alread
Game Designer

Hello! Once again, the time has come for me to share some insight with you all regarding the design of LotR's latest expansion set. The fact that I am given only one article to share this kind of information with you is a bit saddening, since there is so much I could tell! That being said though, I'll use the time that has been given to me to the best of my ability.

There are two cultures I'd like to talk about today: Sauron and Rohan. These two cultures went through the most changes throughout the design process, mostly because everything we came up with wasn't working! So let's start with Sauron, and I'll lead you through its growing pains, from start to finish.

Presidents and Their Armies

It all started with a theory: there's a small number of 'large' Orcs (these guys were the 'presidents') leading all the other smaller Orcs. Many of the large Orcs that were originally designed for Two Towers actually made it into Helm's Deep, such as Grishnákh. The smaller Orcs had some problems though. For example, take a look at the minion below:

Twilight cost 0
Strength 3
Vitality 2
Site 6
Game text: To play, spot a [Sauron] Sentry.
This minion is strength +4 while in the same skirmish as another [Sauron] Orc.

What's a [Sauron] Sentry you may ask? Sentries were the keyword assigned to all the large Orcs. So as a result, you couldn't play any of the zero cost Orcs until you got a president out, at which point you could just drop those Orcs down afterwards for free.

One of the early drafts of Sauron cards had ten zero cost Orcs in it. The entire strategy had a very 'all or nothing' feel to it, if you didn't have a president in hand you couldn't play any of your other Orcs! After attempting to tweak the cards a bit, I decided to go back to the drawing board. It was a good experience to see if 'free' could work in the LotR game system. This implementation didn't, so what was next?

I began to look at old Sauron strategies to look for inspiration. And then, I saw deck destruction.

A new theory came to me: deck destruction is bad in the sense that my opponent can't defend against it, because the very cards that's he trying to defend against it with are being discarded! So, what if new Sauron cards forced a Free Peoples player to draw lots of cards, instead of simply discarding them from the top of the deck? This lead to the birth of Orcs such as the one below:

Twilight cost 3
Strength 9
Vitality 3
Site 6
Game text: Each time this minion wins a skirmish, you may make the Free Peoples player draw 3 cards.

The number of minions that had a mechanic similar to the one above was once again around ten. This mechanic was better, but still had problems. We couldn't make enough balanced Orcs that forced the Free Peoples player to draw cards. Most of them made it too easy make your opponent draw, while others were impossible to pull off. In many playtest games players were getting decked by site 5, thus making it easy for a fellowship to get a 'free ride' through the rest of the game. Once again, tweaks to the mechanic were attempted, and failed. Now what?

I wanted the smaller Orcs to have sort of a swarmish feel to them, which meant hand extension and card drawing. This time I dove into giving each small Orc a method of drawing cards. The feel was good. First time around however none of the Orcs had to exert to perform their hand extending ability, they just had to remove pool. In combination with Forces of Mordor, this proved to be pretty ridiculous. Especially because this massive swarm of Orcs you could generate each had two vitality! One PATHs wasn't going to save you against these guys. As a result, all the Orcs now have to exert to perform their card drawing abilities. After numerous long nights and lots of feedback from our testers, we felt these guys were good enough to go. The large Orcs are still around; they just play a less crucial role than they once did back in the day.

While all of the above was going on, a similar evolution process was occurring in the Rohan culture. Thankfully I never had to go back to the drawing board on Rohan, because from day one there was always one clear goal: powerful and interesting possessions.

The Rohan Possession Circus

A major goal for Helm's Deep was to give the Rohan culture a stronger cultural identity than we did in the Two Towers base set. Since they are very possession-oriented, why not give them a unique way of handling possessions that no other culture has? Sounded great, but at first was an absolute headache. We had:

A. Cards that allowed you to play possessions during the maneuver and skirmish phases.
B. Cards that allowed you to discard the possessions for a bonus (both on the weapons and on other miscellaneous ally cards).
C. Cards that allowed you to place possessions from your discard pile beneath your draw deck for a bonus.
D. Cards that allowed you to manipulate the bottom of your draw deck to get those possessions back into your hand.

Once you got these possessions back into your hand, you could start the above cycle all over again! It might sound neat, but imagine doing all of this in the middle of a game. You may win by sending your opponents into a coma while doing all of this!

At this point I started to scale back the cycle above. I first removed the bottom section. This helped, but players were still constantly checking their discard pile to see if they had any Rohan possessions in it, at which point they'd have to then pick up their deck and place that possession under it, and then perform whatever bonus they got for doing all this. Sounds neat, but once again this was a time issue. The entire process interrupted the natural flow of the game and still took way too much effort to perform.

So I scaled it back again. Leaving just parts A and B of the cycle above. We played it, we balanced it, we printed it. As a designer, I'm still learning to this day that simplicity can be a good thing. Experiences like this one seem to really hit home for me when I think about all the simplifying I had to do to make a mechanic like this flow well and be playable.

The above experiences are only a fraction of what went on during the design on the set, but hopefully the rest of the team can fill you in on some of the other cultures in the following weeks. If you have any questions feel free to email me at joe.alread@decipher.com, or you can try and catch me on the message boards. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the set!

January 28, 2003